NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. chairman William Harrison plans to retire from the third-biggest US bank at the end of the year and expects to hand the post to chief executive officer Jamie Dimon.Harrison, 63, will leave on December 31 after spending his entire career at the New York-based bank and its predecessors, JPMorgan said yesterday in a statement. Dimon, 50, succeeded him as CEO in January, six months earlier than planned.

Harrison joined Chemical Banking Corp. in 1967 and helped engineer some of the biggest bank mergers in history, including acquisitions of Chase Manhattan Corp. and J.P. Morgan & Co. His last major takeover as CEO, the July 2004 purchase of Bank One Corp. for $58 billion, brought Dimon to the company as the successor Harrison failed to develop internally.

"Part of the driver of the merger was to get Jamie Dimon to run the whole bank," said Colin Glinsman, chief investment officer at Oppenheimer Capital, which owns JPMorgan shares. "He's had that primary role in the last year or two, so it's the completion of a change that had already happened."

A commercial banker, Harrison ran the company's European operations and later its US and global corporate-banking divisions. He was vice chairman at Chemical when CEO Walter Shipley agreed to buy Chase Manhattan for $10 billion, a record for a US bank deal at the time. He succeeded Shipley in 1999.

More purchases followed, as Harrison stitched together an institution that sold everything from securities underwriting, merger advice and mutual funds to private banking, mortgages and commercial loans.

"Bill's strategic vision and his ability to manage complex change have been instrumental in positioning our firm as a leader in global finance," Dimon said in the statement. "I will miss Bill, but hope to continue to benefit from his wise counsel."

The company said in today's statement "it is expected" the board will elect Dimon chairman when Harrison retires.

In remaining until year-end, Harrison will have outlasted most of his contemporaries, including Citigroup Inc.'s Sanford Weill, 73, Morgan Stanley's Phil Purcell, 63, and Hugh McColl, 71, of Bank of America Corp., all of whom built financial empires primarily through acquisitions.

Dimon's Choices

When JPMorgan bought Bank One, the companies agreed to keep Harrison as CEO until 2006. He and Dimon coexisted at the bank, they and colleagues have said, defying sceptics who predicted Harrison would exit shortly after the merger closed.

Harrison's key lieutenants didn't last as long. Don Layton and David Coulter, both vice chairmen and members of the office of the chairman, left the bank since the merger. So have Chief Financial Officer Dina Dublon and mortgage bank head Stephen Rotella.

Harrison, who played basketball for Hall of Fame Coach Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina, said earlier this year that Dimon's changes were appropriate. "He's got to run the company on the basis that he's comfortable with, starting with the people he has in key jobs," he said.

Today most of JPMorgan's senior managers are from Bank One, or worked for Dimon at Citigroup, where he was president until 1998.

Shares of JPMorgan have gained 19 percent this year.